Yes, I subscribe to many feminist beliefs. Men can be feminists, and it's not all about angry women who think all men are pigs and that nonsense. Not trying to put those words in your mouth, but that is the common view of it.

In my opinion, regardless of it being a politically or religiously motivated to keep AOC laws high, it is beneficial to keep them at around 17. It may seem like a ridiculously strict government mandate to some, but to others it seems like a safeguard on the naive nature of young ones. I'd be alright to argure this more, but not here in a comments page. Last word goes to you.

And yes Chuft, it seems I did used AOC and marriage age as the same thing, when I should have been using marriage age. But in taht regard, it applies to my argument. The push was for a higher marriage age, because a low marriage age made it institutionally okay to have sex with young girls. This is all from a feminist view point, which I am going off of.

In case I haven't conveyed this correctly yet, I think the surge of women's rights resulted in pedophilia being depicted as a more villainous act in our society by way of raising the AOC, thus keeping marriage from putting a moral face on marrying and sexing young girls.Pedophilia is not directly an oppression of women's rights, but it seems that as a result of those rights, pedophilia was vilified here. You point to a more global scale, and I think we are most likely not on the same page in this argument.

I think that women wanted that to change, but due to no rights, it was not possible. I could be wrong there, but I think 13 year olds weren't too excited about marrying 30 year olds. So here is where I see the link; early AOC laws protected the reputation of people with pedophilic urges (IMO), it pretty much made pedophilia normal. With women having no rights, they had little access to change that, but eventually did. I don't have internet sources atm, but I was going on Sociology 104 notes.

LazyTown - My original point was that you can't use America's past AOC laws to justify arguing against current AOC laws. I believe that past AOC laws were a way for older men to put a moral face on their marriage (leading to sex) with vastly underaged girls. As women gained rights, they wanted this changed. It may have been a political strategy for feminism, but that was one side of the coin. I think their experience also played a part in wanting the change (here is where I see oppression).

Women Christian Temperance Union to criminalize rape. They had campaigns to raise the age of consent and to make statutory rape laws. This helped them strengthen laws against rape, as it was an effective political strategy to open the door to say that all rape was bad. Acting on pedophilia is rape. Rape was compaigned against because women wanted the right to justice against the crime. Some of WCTU were probably raped at a young age. Think women liked rape? How much clearer does the correlation need to be?

LazyTown - Wish this wasn't where I was writing this, but you gotta know. You are completely off mark. In what part of my post did I state that America is the pinnacle of morality in which we should universally consider pedophilia laws? What I was posting about is that it is BS to state that in the 1800s, age of consent was 8-10 years old, and that pedophilia is thus okay somehow. Also feminism in the 1800s WAS deeply tied to age of consent laws. It was a backdoor strategy by the...

So a few people here have been bashing age of consent laws by saying that in early America it was ok for older men to marry girls as young as 10 or 12. There is so much ignorance of history with this line of thought. Women had NO rights in early America, so why the hell do you think men could get away with this depravity? Men who raped would get a slap on the wrist at the most. Pedophilia laws were pushed by women who lived in that kind of society and so they could begin to vilify rape. +3 music -2 old